"Right now we are a citywide incubator of unbridled capitalism, writes Glen David Gold. "And driving is where it comes out most obviously to me."

"Right now we are a citywide incubator of unbridled capitalism, writes Glen David Gold. "And driving is where it comes out most obviously to me."

Photo: Debra Hemrich / EyeEm / Getty Images

Image 2 of 3

Glen David Gold: “Right now we are a citywide incubator of unbridled capitalism. ... And driving is where it comes out most obviously to me.”

Glen David Gold: “Right now we are a citywide incubator of unbridled capitalism. ... And driving is where it comes out most obviously to me.”

Photo: Courtesy Glen David Gold

Image 3 of 3

So long, San Francisco: The driving is what made me hit the road

1 / 3

Back to Gallery

I have lived in San Francisco on and off since 1974 and in this, my final word as a San Franciscan, I would like to explain why I’ve gone and left. It’s the driving.

San Francisco has always been notoriously difficult to drive in. We take our sometimes seemingly and sometimes genuinely random one-way streets, our insane hills, our unannounced dead ends and our secret alleyways seriously. I, for instance, live on a terrace that you can’t actually find on Google Maps, and not one resident here wants that to change. As a town, we didn’t so much explode the typical grid as let a spoiled and angry child fling shards of blocks into the air and then declare their scattered testimony to be “city planning.” What kind of monsters made Market, the key street in the city, diagonal to everything else, and then used it to bisect the Financial District, then threaded traffic across it to get to the main commuter bridge and the ballpark?

Guidebooks for tourists discuss most of the above but demur when it comes to the worst part of driving here: drivers. For most of my life, San Francisco had the worst drivers I’d ever encountered. I eventually made peace with them when I realized it was obvious that about 7 in 10 had never actually driven before. This was why they seemed to have woken up behind the wheel of a car, puzzled as to what all those switches and pedals did, nervous about doing anything wrong, coasting to a stop when there was a green light ahead, baffled by how angry everyone else was when they had worked so hard to center their car over those dotted white lines, suspicious of accelerating, as that seemed aggressive or even Republican in its intent. If San Francisco ran on a kind of European elan, driving was, like coveting your neighbor’s summer home, something that might occur but was simply not talked about.

There is a newer kind of bad driver here. I could do a taxonomy of the types of vehicle, from the mud-spattered Land Rover just back from Burning Man (even if it’s, I dunno, February) to the gold-plated Lamborghini Aventador that we all made fun of when it seemed to be an outlier. But the specific model doesn’t matter so much as the attitude expressed, somewhat by the car, but mostly by how it is driven: “I am going places.” That is short hand for selfishness, the same way “I deplore voter fraud” is shorthand for racism. Because if you’ve watched how these new bad drivers maneuver down Gough or Fulton or Mission or Geary, you already know that their more complete motto is “I am going places and I’m going to get there” (wherever “there” is) “ahead of you” (no matter who you are) “because —” (well, we’ll get into that a little later).

Kendall Jenner Finally Addressed The Rumors About Her SexualityMarieClaire

Jonathan Rhys Meyers - why I left IrelandAssociated Press

When you throw a bag of Adderall-infused fish into the aquarium of meek, thoughtless San Francisco drivers, the result is a bizarre ecosystem of flamingos and hippos, each of them constantly startling the other with what appears to them like witless and inexplicable dominance displays.

Washington Square is one of my favorite San Francisco places, because it isn’t square, it’s not on Washington Street, and the statue there isn’t of Washington but Ben Franklin, placed in part to disguise the universally loathed temperance fountain donated to encourage San Francisco to stop drinking booze. In other words, the only thing that could make it a more traditional San Francisco spot is if neighborhood opposition had kept it from being built in the first place.

I’m fond of eyeing the intersections near here to see what the state of the art in four-way-stop etiquette looks like. In the old days, taking right of way was made almost impossible because no driver wanted to trash his or her progressive ideals by taking anything, much less what someone else might deserve more. The Subaru Outback with Eugene McCarthy stickers on it would only cross the intersection when convinced they were doing it not for themselves but for the indigenous people of El Salvador.

It’s not that this is untrue now. It’s that these same people are still here, only 20 years older. They are now hood-to-taillight with new drivers who have absolutely no problem taking the right of way, especially if it doesn’t belong to them. Because that is the rule when you are new San Francisco: if someone has yielded right of way to one car, or one pedestrian, or one confused tourist hokey-pokeying at the corner with one foot in the road, he has yielded to you, too, wherever you are. It turns out right of way belongs to whomever feels most entitled to take it. There are no consequences. At least not that they admit to. I, on the other hand, see a pretty dire consequence.

My girlfriend and I were recently standing in front of Golden Boy, where the sun somehow shines constantly on that line that lasts all afternoon, and ahead of us were people who were Part of the Problem (#PotP, if you like) and one was explaining to the rest that no, parking was not hard anymore. He gestured toward the street, where his Infiniti was double-parked. “As long as you turn your hazards on, you’re good. You can park anywhere in San Francisco like that.” His friends weren’t skeptical. Instead, they seemed suddenly enlightened. You can now do anything.

The reason you’re not supposed to double-park is that it’s dangerous for other drivers. The reason there’s a right of way is so that we don’t all run into each other. The reason there are rules is that there’s a society here, and we’re all supposed to fit in somehow. But not anymore. The progressive, fussy, overly sensitive, yammering groups of San Franciscans asserting that we need to have our needs understood and rights acknowledged in order to get along together don’t matter anymore.

San Francisco has frequently been the nose cone of a missile that the rest of the continent follows during times of social change. We were early to gay rights, Beats, hippies, the human potential movement, AIDS, every wax and wane of tech, not to mention that whole Gold Rush thing. I would have been annoyed to live here in the 1850s, 1880s and even the 1960s, but for every era like that, a new era arises to torment the previous generation. So, but for one problem, I can say: this too will pass, and in 20 years something else will be here that will also seem dire. The problem is that “20 years” time frame, because I’m not sure it’s going to happen.

Right now we are a citywide incubator of unbridled capitalism, the masters of our digital future working toward the end of the troublesome concept of “we.” And driving is where it comes out most obviously to me.

Why do people sometimes lose the will to drive, coasting to a stop? Why is right on red a secret so many are excluded from? Why does using a turn signal feel for some drivers like giving away their Social Security number? There are so many bad behaviors to catalog, but here’s the most terrifying:

Why do folks need to get there before you do? It’s because as a city, our current contribution to American culture is that we no longer see the future as a renewable resource. We’re a smart people — smart people tend to move here — and we as a species are suffering a dawning awareness that we have gone past sustainability and into darkness. It’s over. We as a city believe we’ve got about 20 years left before everything collapses. It is lovely that we recycle, and it’s charming that we charge for paper bags. But I’m not talking about those cosmetic touches, those sustainable cocktails we serve in first class as the plane goes down. I mean something much bigger. Optimism depends on faith, and our faith in organizing to prevent disaster has been co-opted. Which is embarrassing for San Francisco.

This feeling has been engineered here. We have a cultural pessimism that pre-existed the insanity in Washington. It makes jettisoning “we” much more easy. If there’s not much left at the end of the rainbow, then one of us is going to get there first, and take it. This attitude crystallizes every time someone gets behind the wheel of a car here, but you see it unfolding on sidewalks, in restaurants, in real estate, in the absurd construction of skyscrapers on landfill.

We are all in this together. We always have been and we always will be, no matter where things go. But for the past few years in San Francisco, it’s been apparent the counter-myth is ascendant. And this is why I left — it turns out there are places that haven’t yet conspired in the assisted suicide of “we.” There are places where people look each other in the eye, even when they drive.

A friend at a party a few nights ago said that San Francisco has lost its mission statement. I disagree — it’s just that the mission has changed, to protect that which is yours, before we get to the end, which we all see coming, hard and fast. That’s our mission statement.

Buckle up.

Glen David Gold is the author of the novels “Carter Beats the Devil” (2001) and “Sunnyside” (2009) and the forthcoming memoir “I Will Be Complete” (Knopf, June 2018). He has moved, ironically, to Los Angeles. Email: books@sfchronicle.com